SimCity iPhone Review

Lay on your hands and heal this city, hizzoner.

SimCity is a remarkable franchise from which most open world games sprung. The product of famed designed Will Wright, you are the mayor, shepherd, and city planner for a metropolis you build quite literally from the ground up. From zoning commercial districts to installing universities, you control the fate of your city. Will you take it to the brink of ruin or transform it into a paradise full of happy citizens?

SimCity for the iPhone appears to be based on SimCity 3000. From your isometric view, you can scroll and zoom through crowded downtown streets and see an impressive amount of detail on your parks and buildings. But before you get to take the metro tour, you must first build it. SimCity includes a tutorial that every player should use because it explains both concepts and controls. And if you are still a little shaky about what to do beyond the tutorial, try out one of the starter cities included in the game. These should give you an idea of the scope and breadth of the game so when you decide you want to try out your own city, starting with nothing but a grassy field, you have a general idea of what to do. Even then, though, I suspect that without any goal-oriented scenarios, there still may be some floundering. Some of that is only natural when you have a game with so many tools, but I'd be happy for an update that includes some sort of structure for casual gamers that may not have the time or patience needed to get the absolute most out of the game.

Once you start your city, you have so many options at your disposal. You must zone areas for residential, industrial, and commercial and somehow get the balance right so you bring in a steady amount of income via a healthy economy while giving your sims enough places to live. And then you need to consider basic services, like water and power. You will lay pipes under the streets and stretch power lines across the city blocks. And then there are services, like police, fire, and education. These take money out of your budget, but are essential to keep your people safe and happy. Mind you, that's just the physical part of city planning. In addition to erecting buildings and piecing together an efficient power grid, you need to monitor things like tax rates. It's an incredible balancing act that you will fail at perhaps once or twice before you really get the hang of it all.

This would all be overwhelming without a decent control scheme, and SimCity certainly succeeds here. Your city is flanked on the left by a series of buttons that pull out menus for building streets and tracks, service buildings, zoning, and a bulldozer for tearing down past mistakes or improving a troubled area of the city. Along the button of the screen is a ticker that gives you regular updates on your city status, and that is joined by buttons that send you to help topics or city advisors/management/budget menus. I had little problem using these buttons after going through the tutorial and a test city.

Controlling the actual building is not without problems. You really need to zoom in to get the borders of your zoned areas or street lengths just right. But zooming in often causes stutters as the game struggles to draw your city in greater detail. All of the zooming and loading eats up time. Occasionally, it's all just too much and the game crashes. That's really too bad. If the game crashes out on you, I'd advise restarting the device entirely before jumping back in because I did suffer back-to-back crashes once without doing so.

When the game does successfully zoom in and render your city, you will be impressed with the level of detail. It's very cool to watch your neighborhoods grow and evolve in real time. (Also fun: watching disasters unfold.) The music is exceptionally well done. There are a handful of tracks that accompany the city-building action and I liked all of them.

SimCity was reviewed with version 1.0.0.

The Verdict

SimCity is ambitious -- probably one of the biggest titles on the App Store thus far. Fans of the long-running series will certainly enjoy themselves in this port, but there is too little direction for newcomers and too many crashes to overlook. This game needs to be stabilized. An update for that with some scenarios would be heartily welcomed. But even without any sort of helping hand, SimCity is still a good value for your download dollars, as there are literally dozens of hours of game in here for diehards.